american interior • 10.30.17

We drove out across the border, out away from the snow blanketed mountains and sheer rock walls, away from the infinite pines and the lovely little caribou that sat in the road for whom we waited to cross.

We drove through rolling hills on desolate highways, illuminated by beautiful Wyoming sunsets and waning Nebraskan moonlight. The horizon glittered and breathed with light from far away towns and laid still, pitch black, curtained by the complete emptiness of the American Interior.

We would sometimes go for hours before seeing civilization, most of which consisted of lonely barns scattered about the country roads and deserted towns built along the interstate, looking like Hollywood sets for cowboy movies, but really just remnants of a time and people long past, forgotten.

We drove home.

good night, highway moon • 10.22.17

We pulled over on the side of the highway.

The road was completely empty save for us and another car, the sky was cloudless, and the moonlight shone brilliantly on everything.

True moonlight makes the world feel like a different universe, one where everything is exactly the same but coated in a luminous, pearlescent blue and totally still. It’s as if time has stopped.

The smell of the Rockies at night was a combination of fresh pine and burning wood in the fall, total wilderness mixed with the familiarity and comfort of home. The cliffs of the mountains around us turned into colossal mirrors, illuminating the forest around us and drawing our attention upwards beyond the road.

Stars were born and constellations turned from fiction to fact as our eyes adjusted and the dark sky turned from sheer black to the cover of a National Geographic focused on astronomy. We sat down. Harshil pulled out a 24-pack of Shit Lite and told us to help ourselves.

Postured in the middle of the road with a can of cheap​ ​beer in my hand, an old comforter over my shoulders, and my friends close by, I stared first at the endless road, then at the endless sky, and then back at the endless road.

It was the same road that would lead us to our campsite later that night and the same road that would deliver us back to our real lives where we would most likely never sit in the middle of the highway again, in the dead of winter, at two in the morning, alone with the world and in good company.

good morning, still snow • 10.23.17

I stepped out of the bathroom to the sound of absolute silence, bright light, and white snow. I was alone with the unobstructed morning sun and the crunching of light frost beneath my feet.

An endless volume of thin pines extended out from where I stood and between each of them was a silent, falling curtain of soft white. The air tasted crisp when I breathed it in and my breath felt perfect when I breathed it out.

I weaved through the trees, trampled over fresh fallen snow, and made my way to my friends. They sat huddled around the fire, staring quietly together at its center; hungover, cold, in awe. We all sat and watched.

drunk dreams at the pig • 11.02.17

The drink felt warm, disgusting in my hand and mouth. The only thing that drunk me had enjoyed that night at the bar was the memory of the last time that I’d been there, not even two months ago. When drunk me had ordered the same drink and leaned against the same wall with the same mug in my hands and when drunk me had felt at ease with you close by.

Your lips curled into that perfect smile that I’d come to know, love, and expect.

You laughed at everything I said and made me feel like I was doing something right, something that made you happy and full. Sat on the stool with the hood of your fur coat kissing the brim of your neck, grinning and next to me.

goodbye, home • 10.02.15

All that we had lived and experienced culminated into that moment when we were both together and alive.

Goodbye home, beautiful eagle screech in the canyon and dusty mountains. Goodbye love, goodbye brothers, goodbye beauty: rolling waves and comforting light.

tuesday, may 24th • 05.24.16

why am I so afraid of your bare skin; of that great beauty I embarrassingly obsess and callus after?

Is it that ultimate sin, the great overwhelming-ness of emotion I feel around you and that wild unseemly lust that claws desperately at my throat in times of urgency and despair whenever you say something irrevocably sweet or sad or infinitesimally minuscule or hardly worth worrying about?: that truth that begs to be released; the untimely desire and fire in me.

I wonder who feels that same heat and I wonder if you are on the list of tired and worn keepers. It feels like the slipping away of sand through your fingers and bits of your soul through your ribs. I obsess wildly on the possibilities… that if you and I are the same maybe it could work, or most definitely it would work! Or, at the very least, we might get what we want; some kind of disparate-less closure (whatever that may mean then).

Still, the look I’ve seen in your eyes and the fire I’ve felt in my heart, the binding blunders of the tongue and careless passes of your gaze over mine and the brief touches of hands and the loneliness we burn away together: the temptation to proclaim affection and render the room silent for a brief while and set the two of us apart for a brief while or maybe slip deeper into a hole of bloodless affection and joy … I would make no effort to escape its satin grip and delicate hold.

Again, those clawing hands clasp at the entries and exits of my soul … through little peeps and moans and slips and embarrassing public confection-directions and songs I write and poems I write and the way I look at you and the eagerness with which I hold to love you.

but everyone feels the same fears;

1. frantic-paranoia

2. jealousy

3. wildly-exaggerated-bouts-of-fear

4. loneliness-in-the-company-of-others

5. self-loathing-and-cruel-hatred

6. the-slipping-away-of-limitless-time-and-affection

7. half-hearted:

   (a) masturbation,

   (b) obligations,

   (c) intrepidations,

   (d) good-sensations,

   (e) unruly-vibrations,

coupled with timeless joy and memory.

The touch of the woman you love. Complete with her flaws and cruel distastes, bad habits and foul moods; soft lips and soft “lips”, scents like fresh pine and bare fruit and irresistible beauty and light to warm your life: An experience shared rarely, that long lasting and seemingly infinite beauty that is Life!

Witness the passing of a year, a decade, a century, a millennia, countless deaths, births and other colorful exaggerations.

nonetheless, love is as you would expect: a lust for life and the unimportant absence of both cruel and wise thoughts.